“Board 28 is preparing (or has prepared) a doc,” said an earlier comment, “to be discussed at the AC in March which is putting BB against the wall. Directors in DG1 are already informing some selected staff that the situation is very difficult for BB and that the confrontation with the AC will be so harsh to convince him that he has to go. [...] Let’s keep the finger cross and keep the EPO under pressure. Many of the explicit and implicit supporters of BB will try to recycle themselves like some Nazis did after Hitler’s fall. Beware of the hypocrites!”

We also have the following document which is in German (English/French/Spanish translations would be more than welcome). This document was addressed to the Praesidium of the AC. It says:

It sure looks like the Battistelli era is almost finished. “I am hearing rumours that he has gone,” one person told us a short while ago, but “it’s unconfirmed however,” said another person, “something seriously is going on right now! PANIC ON THE TITANIC and that is NO rumor” (we heard it from quite a few separate sources).

OPEN LETTER TO ALL STAFF

Dysfunctions in the EPO’s disciplinary procedures

Dear Colleagues,

The independence of the Disciplinary Committee (DC) and its members is an essential prerequisite for a just and fair trial, not only for the individuals facing grave accusations, but also for confidence in the EPO as a whole. It is neither the CSC’s role nor its intention to interfere with this independence, let alone issue instructions to the DC. However it is the CSC’s duty to comment on and if necessary propose actions that favour the smooth running of statutory bodies, all in the best interests of staff. It is in this context and taking into consideration that six disciplinary sanctions have been taken against staff representatives consecutively over a very short period of time, the CSC believes it is urgent to “Pause, Reflect, (Re)connect”, that is to learn from past events.

As highlighted in a letter dated 12 November 2014, the EPO no longer has a properly functioning disciplinary procedure, a claim that was reiterated in an open letter to the AC Chairman, dated 4 March 2015.

I – Nominations to the DC: loyalty vs. independence

A DC is a statutory body comprising two members appointed by the President and two by the CSC, drawn at random from a pool of possible candidates.

The President appoints the chairpersons of the DC. Until 2013 all DC chairs were chosen from the DG3 Boards of Appeal, whose independence from the President is guaranteed by the EPC. He stopped this long-standing tradition in 20141.

Following the introduction of the new career system, the EPO President decided that the CSC may no longer nominate members of DG3 to DC procedures involving staff in job groups 2 and 3. Since it remains a requirement under Article 98(4) ServRegs that DC members shall not be of a lower job group than that of the accused, this does not leave the CSC any other option than to select their nominees from the few willing managers and directors employed in those groups2.
_______1 CSC members have legally challenged this change. Internal appeals are pending.2 The President has also repeatedly interfered with CSC nominations: for example, the nominations of the CSC for 2015 and 2016 were disregarded (see the nominations retained by the President versus the CSC 2015 nomination letter).

In stark contrast, the President almost exclusively nominates Directors and Principal Directors as members for all job groups whereas he should in principle nominate non-managers for procedures in job groups 4 to 6 to more faithfully reflect the staff demography. As a result, the members appointed by the President drawn from the list of potential nominees for a particular case will always be managers, except if the defendant is in job group 6.

Besides being an explicit requirement written in the job description of all EPO staff members, loyalty (obedience) is to be expected of today’s management. The present Administration has demonstrated on several occasions that this obligation applies in particular for managers and those taking actions that are perceived to be disloyal should expect to be punished severely.

Further, since senior managers nominated by the President are often employed under some form of renewable contract (where continuation may depend on Presidential approval), staff may doubt that they can act fully independently in performing their function as DC members.

The Office has endorsed a structure that the European Court of Human Rights found objectionable3: the convening officer (President) appoints the court (is their superior officer) and acts also as the confirming officer (President). Such a DC framework no longer meets the requirements that the ECHR consider necessary for a fair procedure4.

II – DC recommendations systematically ignored

After Aurélien Pétiaud, Michael Lund and Els Hardon (1), now it is the turn for Malika Weaver, Ion Brumme and again Els Hardon (2) to be severely sanctioned for activities carried out in their capacity as staff representatives, union officials and/or CSC appointees.

In his Communiqué No.2, the President insists that the DC recommendations were all “unanimous”, “justifying high sanctions, including dismissal”, which in our opinion (mis)leads the uninformed reader to believe that he is merely following the DC recommendations. This is not the reality – in most cases the DC concluded that many of the serious allegations could not be founded in facts.

The harsh reality is that in all six (!) cases, the President has effectively disregarded the unanimous DC recommendation and decided upon sanctions (up to immediate dismissal with reduction of pension) that are far more severe than the recommendations of the DC. Indeed, in cases where the DC rejected as unsupported allegations made against staff representatives, the President
_______3 see case Findlay vs United Kingdom or a summary why such a model is unfair4 http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Guide_Art_6_ENG.pdf

nevertheless seems to have ignored this and based his judgement and decision on such allegations being proven.

The CSC is well aware that the DC is not responsible for the President’s final decision itself. We assume the DC will have attempted to weigh diligently all the available facts and then assess the consequences of their recommendation. In some cases they may even have sought to find prudent compromises to reduce sanctions in case of doubt. Unfortunately, not only has the President chosen to cherry-pick the harshest of the recommendations, he has in fact gone much further than any of them, applying blatantly disproportionate sanctions with dramatic consequences for the individuals themselves.

III – Six Staff Representatives sanctioned in short lapse of time

Because of the quite extraordinary aggressive attitude presently shown by senior management and in fear of further reprisals, the concerned individuals do not wish to publish more specific, personal information related to their disciplinary procedures. We can, however, provide you with the following insights into their individual predicaments:

Not only is Mr Brumme fired from the EPO with immediate effect, but the normal daily life of his newly established family will be disrupted and put under enormous strain in the future.

If any staff member had been found guilty of very serious charges in a fair trial, such sanctions and their consequences might be understandable. However, this is certainly not the case here: indeed, it appears that it is not the original charges that Mr Brumme has been accused of that are the basis for the sanction. Rather, it is the fact that he denied them publicly, i.e. defended himself against any wrongdoings, that was apparently considered to severely breach “the confidentiality obligation” of the procedure.

Firstly, it should be remembered that confidentiality is primarily meant to protect the accused staff member – who is presumed innocent until proven guilty – and not to be used to render him guilty for an alleged procedural error. We also note that this charge was only added during the course of the procedure. Last but not least, it should be remembered that as an elected staff representative, Mr Brumme has a mandate from staff to act on their behalf. Hence his informing staff on any issues in relation with his mandate and personal integrity is not only legal, it is a moral and professional obligation for all Staff Representatives towards their constituency.

It is a sad outcome that today, at 41 years of age, Mr Brumme faces being an outcast. How can ruining a staff member’s life be seen as a “justified and proportionate” sanction, particularly for a staff representative simply defending himself in “public” (actually EPO internally) from an attack on both his functions and his integrity?

Similarly, Ms Hardon sees her pension, a deferred remuneration accumulated after many years of active work in the EPO, arbitrarily reduced by 20%. This is a very rare sanction that is normally reserved for extreme cases where individuals have been convicted of the most serious crimes and felonies like corruption or gross misconduct. How can such a sanction be “justified and proportionate” in her case?

IV – No particular protection for staff and union representatives in the EPO

In most European countries, and certainly in France and Germany, staff and union representatives enjoy particular protection and external instances5 other than their employer are in place to decide what sanctions are appropriate to be applied against them. The employer cannot simply publicly declare that the cases “relate to personal failures of the employees”, impose heavy sanctions and de facto disregard “the fact that the employees involved are staff representatives who should enjoy a higher level of protection and freedom of expression, having in mind their particular duties.”6

V – The work of the DC has changed in the new world of “political trials”

The EPO “culture” has changed to such an extent that the disciplinary procedures seems to have mutated into a fully conscious and demonstrative policy of the President to apply the most ruthless and excessive sanctions, presumably with the intention of having an oppressive, intimidating effect on all staff. In this context, such disciplinary procedures can be seen as “political trials”.

In this sense, the CSC makes the following observations:

The President seems to be instrumentalising the DC: the recommendations are represented in a biased manner to give the impression that there is unanimous support for the sanctions taken. At the same time, the statutory confidentiality clause is abused to prevent any third party from knowing the findings of the DC and thereby removing transparency from the procedure.

Arbitrariness and abuse of power: even though the DC may strive to write a fair, balanced and coherent recommendation reflecting the established facts and taking into consideration any doubts or uncertainties, only parts of a recommendation are being cherry-picked or misrepresented, presumably to arrive at a desired outcome. However, in the absence of any internal review and without any effective recourse to fair and timely legal remedies, the President can take any decision he likes with virtually total impunity.

The DC is rapidly becoming an integral part of political “show trials”, especially in cases against staff / union representatives: in all (6 out of 6!) cases, the accusations appear to be politically motivated, as were the expected outcome of the procedure. The DC exhibits traits of a reincarnation of the 17th Century Star Chamber7.

The above dysfunctions are equally valid for the Internal Appeal Committee8 where no members are at present appointed by the CSC. Both bodies are equally hazardous for not only their nominated members, but also individual staff members involved and Staff at large.

VI – Lack of judicial review in a reasonable time frame

In view of the flaws in the disciplinary procedures, a genuine independent judicial review is all the more essential. However, the ILO Administrative Tribunal (ILOAT) chokes under a workload mainly caused by the EPO and it does not foresee any accelerated procedure for considering cases with sanctions as heavy as dismissal, let alone issuing any form of injunction. Instead, the cases have to wait their turn, which currently will result in delays of several years before judgement. Should the ILOAT persist in refusing to fast track such cases, then the national courts in the member states should declare themselves exceptionally competent, lift the immunity of the Office and review themselves the decisions of the President.

The Central Staff Committee
_______7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber8 Please note the Board of Auditors’ review of the Internal Appeals procedure in CA/20/15 & CA/21/15: according to these studies, the President does not follow recommendations of his own Appeals Committee and (almost) systematically rules against staff. The ILO-AT is ill-equipped to act as a trial court (Judgment No. 3291). “There is no social peace without access to Justice”. (for more details please refer to the CSC report on the EPO justice)

Summary: The Central Staff Committee of the European Patent Office refuses to be intimidated by Battistelli’s inner circle and insists on the right of staff to go on strike next month

TWISTING the law in its own favour isn't atypical a practice at Battistelli’s EPO (the high-level management). The man revels in autocracy. One person asked me today: “Is there any truth in rumours that the big man has gone?” Rumours that Battistelli has been sacked or resigned (sounds familiar) are most likely false. As one person put it, “the place is bristling with rumours following yesterday’s B28 meeting.

“There is something going on, but I can’t separate the wheat from the chaff.

Interlocutor and representatives to the ballot committee

Dear Ms Bergot,

We refer to your e-mails of Friday 12 February 2016, one addressed to us and one addressed to the colleagues who signed a recent call for strike in accordance with Circular No. 347, initiated and organised by staff (Annex 1).

In the above-mentioned mails you acknowledge that the quorum of 10% of staff has been reached and confirm that the Office will organise a ballot within one month, i.e. on 9 March at the latest.

The call for strike designates an external lawyer as the contact person representing the undersigned. In the e-mail to the petitioners, you state that “strike shall be a means of last report and the time of preparation of the ballot should be used to discuss the claims presented in the call for strike.”

According to your mail “external attorneys cannot be considered as social partners to engage into meaningful discussions regarding to EPO’s internal matters.” The petitioners are therefore invited to designate representatives from among active EPO staff members.

We wish to point out the following:

There is no basis in law or in reason to reject any given person as an interlocutor. Specifically, there is no rule dictating that the European Patent Office
interlocutor must be an active EPO staff member.

It is not clear how the petitioners could designate their representatives. The petitioners do not know each other and in any case cannot send e-mails to more than 50 persons with their EPO e-mail account.

The petition concerns central staff matters. The CSC is the elected staff representation responsible for central matters.

In order to avoid endangering the strike ballot, the external lawyer has asked the CSC to accept delegation of his mandate for any further process or action with regard to the upcoming procedural steps foreseen by the EPO administration. We intend to accept this delegation.

Concerning the mail addressed to us, we designate the following representatives to the ballot committee:

Stéphane Écolivet
Ansgar Wansing

Yours sincerely,

The Central Staff Committee

We confirm that this letter was legitimately decided and produced by the Central Staff Committee1.

The CSC presently consists of 17 members, because two have resigned in Dec 2014 and one has been dismissed in Jan 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee).

One full member of the CSC has been downgraded in Jan 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee). In fact, the Office has launched investigations and disciplinary procedures against other Staff representatives as well, affecting negatively their health.

Summary: Germany, careful not to reveal its bias and gross nepotism (not to mention self interest) in this matter, is starting to push for the Unitary Patent Court (UPC), which would potentially destroy Europe’s wealth by passing a lot of it to very few (already affluent and usually non-European) actors

“The vast majority of European citizens know nothing at all about the UPC, probably by intention — as obscurity serves the UPC’s architects and lobbyists.”“Breaking news is that Germany has produced draft bills for implementing the UPC,” wrote this new commenter, who spreads terrible news that we have been dreading for months (EPO-funded media repeatedly pressured Germany — even by shaming — to do this).

My German may be a little rusty, but I cannot see anything in the two published documents that indicates how German national law will be amended in the light of the substantive provisions of the unitary patent package.

Can anyone shed any light on this situation? I would have thought that at least some modifications of national patent law would be necessary.

“The document of your second link,” added another commenter, “proposes all necessary amendments of German Law, particularly for the international patent act and the patent act. But the first link is the more interesting…”

“UPC is a cash cow for patent lawyers in Germany.”According to this morning’s post from IP Kat: “In its proposal for the legislation implementing the Unified Patent Package in Germany, the German Ministry of Justice suggests a compromise: double patenting vis-a-vis unitary patents is not prohibited, but if an action regarding a unitary patent for the same invention is pending before the Unified Patent Court or is made pending during the national proceeding or has been finally adjudicated by the UPC, then the German court will dismiss the action brought based on the national patent insofar as the patents concern the same invention, provided that the defendant raises the objection before the beginning of the oral hearing (see proposed Article 18 Gesetz über internationale Patentübereinkommen, p. 6 of the linked PDF).”

UPC is a cash cow for patent lawyers in Germany. They would make a lot of money from it, and guess at whose expense…

No wonder it’s mostly patent lawyers who are pushing for the UPC, usually behind closed doors. It’s an attack on democracy. It is a coup. The UPC is yet another rogue project, maybe on par with (or along with) efforts such as TPP. They are hoping to bypass the European public and covertly impose the 1%’s wishes on all who live inside Europe. Deception, propaganda etc. come into play as soon as the public begins to discover what’s going on, whereupon it antagonises. That’s when they start pretending that it’s good for European SMEs and perpetually spread other such myths.

“BristowsUPC”, an LLP rebranded for UPC marketing, has just written about the above. Longtime UPC booster Annsley ​Merelle Ward (also of IP Kat) said: “The German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV) yesterday published the first draft of legislation that will make it possible for Germany to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement. The draft bill was published, together with a second draft bill to implement the Unitary patent system into German law. After a period of consultation, it is anticipated that final draft bills will be introduced into the German parliament before summer 2016. These will then pass through the legislative process in parliament for debate, any amendment, and then a final vote.”

“The EPO’s autocracy is now expanding onto other European institutions.”Only patent lawyers (and their media) rejoice right now (see the positivity, with optimistic phrases like “A significant development for the #UPC.”) while the rest of the public is totally unaware. It is an unacceptable attack on European democracy. “DE, UK & 2 more need to ratify for #UPC to begin,” said the patent maximalists (MIP in this case). As Henrion put it last night: “There should be a call to abolish fiscal priviledges for royalties over any type of IP right, and tax it as the same level as labour #fraud”

The EPO’s autocracy is now expanding onto other European institutions. This too is a cause for alarm. They don’t care what the public thinks; they just do whatever the heck they decided is good for Europe (or for themselves and their mates). It’s like with the EPO the EU is increasingly shadowing the worst practices of the Kremlin; oh, lo and behold whose hands Battistelli is now shaking (warning: epo.org link). To quote the latest puff piece showing Battistelli in Russia: “On the occasion of a visit to the EPO in Munich by Grigory Petrovich Ivliev, the new Director General of Rospatent (the Russian Federal Service for IP), the two institutions have committed to further strengthen their co-operation.”

That was published yesterday. It’s self-serving propaganda disguised as ‘news’ (and Google News indexes it as such).

“While the EPO says (right there on national television) that it intends to ignore the law and refuse to obey the highest court at The Hague it sure feels comfortable to do its patent brainwashing right there at The Hague.”Congratulations, Mr. Battistelli. Having just collaborated with Cubans (who parked Russian nukes just a short distance away from your American masters), you now go visit their old masters in Moscow. Having refused to obey orders from The Hague (renowned for international criminal justice), your obedient PR bunniesnow set up shop in The Hague. Irony is not dead yet. While the EPO says (right there on national television) that it intends to ignore the law and refuse to obey the highest court at The Hague it sure feels comfortable to do its patent brainwashing right there at The Hague.

The EPO is officially a rogue institution out of control. The UPC is its latest project and the main threat to this project is European democracy (meaning, people actually becoming aware of what’s going on and then voting on it, i.e. against it). █

As if this patent institute is totally unchallengeable, like immigration law in Merkel’s Germany

Summary: The latest information from and about the European Patent Office/Organisation, where there has just been a major protest (in Munich), albeit nobody would know it based on or due to the silence of the media

THE Administrative Council (AC) of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) is led by a Dane and some rumours suggest that it may be pursuing (or at least exploring) removal of Battistelli and his team, who have become a disgrace and source of great shame to the Organisation. Karen Melchior, a rather popular (on the Web) Danish diplomat/lawyer*, has just said “Shame on @EPOorg” (European Patent Organisation, led by a Dane), the context being software patents in Europe (context about the EPO in general can be found in our corresponding Wiki).

“Willy Minnoye, as head of internal services was in fact promoted after being found guilty of breaching fundamental rights several years ago when he confiscated private union mail (see ILO judgment 1547).” –AnonymousThankfully we have many sources (more than before, especially after the EPO foolishly chose to censor and threaten us), both outside and inside the EPO. “Willy Minnoye,” told us a source privately, “as head of internal services was in fact promoted after being found guilty of breaching fundamental rights several years ago when he confiscated private union mail (see ILO judgment 1547).” It sure looks like Battistelli and his team have quickly become a massive liability for the Organisation as a whole. “Dear Roy,” wrote to us a person, “thanks for the great work.” But it’s becoming harder to do such work without further input from readers. A partial media blackout in the whole of Europe prevents people from finding out what really goes on inside the EPO. EPO members of staff find themselves fearing communication even with their colleagues and German media might not want to remark negatively about the EPO for reasons we explained here before [1, 2]. All we know so far about the protest and surrounding developments comes from this comment:

Latest news from The Staff Committee is that they have informed the AC that they no longer support the planned Social Survey. Their version is that while BB invited them to nominate an observer for the organising committee, the nominee then wasn’t invited to any meetings and was given the results at the last minute as a fait accompli. The SC consider that their nominee is just a fig leaf to show that BB had dealt with them but that this was not bona fide consultation. Also it seems that no AC members are part of this either so that it is all being organised by BB. Quelle surprise!

In his 4th Feb speech to staff, BB gave the impression that his door was open but that the SC kept refusing to come on in! I wonder how he’ll organise an independent study if no staff will speak to the survey.

Meanwhile, SUEPO is organising a follow-up to a survey from a couple of years ago. Should be revealing but I presume BB’s PR gurus are already writing their rebuttals…

“Only about 10% of European patents get validated in DK [Denmark] currently. Polish gov’t report made similar observation.” –Jesper LundThere’s a reason why some of last year’s protests targeted the Danish Consulate (this actually received press coverage from several Danish newspapers), and it’s not just Mr. Kongstad’s complicity by silence (letting Battistelli totally off the hook and helping Battistelli hide his salary from the European public).

Jesper Lund, who is Danish, responded to Henrion by saying “we happily swallowed the EPO pill in 2014 and accepted a 10-fold increase in patents valid in DK [...] That’s “over time”. Only about 10% of European patents get validated in DK [Denmark] currently. Polish gov’t report made similar observation.”

“The 10x increase is not there yet? With the UPC many countries will see drastic patent warming,” Henrion added.

In order to keep this concise, we shall cover these matters in a separate post about the UPC.

Despite the fact that we are now better equipped to quickly capture any morsel of information about the EPO, we are still not seeing anything about yesterday’s protest, so input from readers is sorely needed right now. Here is how to get in touch. █
______* Melchior prefers “Danish radikale politician.” According to her Web site, she is “a foreign policy professional with an academic background in law [who] worked more than 7 years in the political systems of the EU, Denmark, UK and France.” She attended “Transparency International Summer School on Integrity 2014,” which brings back memories of the EPO’s relation (good and bad, implicating the Danish AC Chairman and Control Risks Group) to Transparency International.

Contents

Desktop

The Ovid-Elsie school district sits an hour west of Flint, Michigan, the city now notorious for being poisoned by its own penny-pinching administrators. The district, which serves roughly 1,600 students, is one of the poorer areas in the state, with a per capita income of just over $15,000. “We’re looking at close to three-quarters of our kids [who] are classified as economically disadvantaged here,” said Kris Kirby, the district’s assistant superintendent. So when it came time to find computer equipment for every classroom, Ovid-Elsie had to get creative.

The school was eager to experiment with Google Chromebooks, which have been sweeping the education market. But even those machines cost several hundred dollars each, far too much for Ovid-Elsie to afford one for every student. Dan Davenport, the director of technology for the area schools, had looked into using Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome operating system, but was stymied by the complexity of supporting a range of different drivers on a mishmash of old computers.

Server

One such distribution is Alpine Linux. Alpine is a very minimal distro, weighing in at only 4.8MB. Although it’s tiny, it’s able to support a wide range of the applications and services that comprise a modern cloud app.

Docker is switching to Alpine as its default OS image. The reduced size will reduce its network traffic massively, and it means smaller and faster containers for cloud applications.

Docker’s future may well lie in the direction of Unikernels, but they are a very new technology, and they require a change of perspective for developers. With Alpine images, programmers still can work with a complete (but minimal) Linux system.

Is blockchain — the distributed database behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — ready for prime time? IBM clearly thinks so. This week, the company announced new Blockchain-as-a-Service offerings in the cloud, a move that follows its recent contribution of 44,000 lines of open source code to the Hyperledger project.

Future innovation in the world of blockchain technology lies just ahead, as more and more companies see the value of initiatives such as the Linux Foundation Hyperledger project. This collaborative effort to bring more use cases to the exciting world of blockchain technology welcomes Ribbit.me as their latest partner. This loyalty solutions startup will bring their expertise and development team to The Linux Foundation, which will spur future innovation in the distributed ledger industry.

After announcing the release of the long-term supported Linux 4.1.18 and Linux 3.12.54 kernels on February 16, 2016, Sasha Levin also informed the Linux world about the availability of the twenty-seventh maintenance build of Linux 3.18.

Linus Torvalds Works in His Bathrobe [Ed: “Linus Torvalds Works in His Bathrobe (headline) […] “I don’t really love other people.”” – how Microsoft propagandists cover Linux. Microsoft’s worst propagandist (in the CBS days) Ina Fried was the one speaking to Torvalds. Clearly a misfit. The main problem with TED is that Bill Gates bribed it enough to essentially, in many cases, have turned it into his for-profit think tank.]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually not a people person. I don’t really love other people, but I do love other people who get involved in my project.

I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of my work, but those people were really lovely people. They used open source in ways I did not want to go. It works beautifully together. You need to have the people people, the communicators, the warm people.

Computer service provider ElasticHosts offers insight into the underlying Linux Kernel technologies used by Docker, LXC and lmctfy

The last two years have seen an explosion of interest in Linux Containers, with many tools emerging, including Docker, LXC, lmctfy, Kubernetes and more.

These tools provide different management interfaces, but in all cases the Linux Containers that they run are powered by two underlying Linux Kernel technologies: cgroups and namespaces. When namespaces matured around Linux 3.8, these were the two key pieces of underlying technology which made modern Linux Containers possible.

Graphics Stack

Considering AMD are in the middle of producing a brand new driver for Linux, it’s not surprising they don’t have Vulkan ready for Linux right from day one. Still, a shame for anyone on AMD hoping to test things out.

On February 17, 2016, Bryce Harrington proudly informed the GNU/Linux community about the official release and immediate availability for download of the final bits of the next-generation Wayland 1.10 display server.

Almost daily we encounter open-source software projects, such as those from the GNOME Stack, showing their love for the Wayland display server, and there are a handful of GNU/Linux distributions that promise to switch to Wayland by default soon.

LilyPond is a free, mature music-typesetting program, similar in flavor to LaTeX. The software is part of the GNU Project and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The authors originally developed LilyPond because they felt that computer-generated scores were, to their eyes, “soulless.” They designed LilyPond to follow the traditions laid down in older engraved scores. The desire for “beautiful” music is what drives the community of people who still work on LilyPond, even after more than a decade.

Version 2.19.36 was released at the end of January, but 2.18 is still considered the stable version. Downloading and installing LilyPond is super easy.

Proprietary

Opera Software, through Błażej Kaźmierczak, has announced the promotion of the Opera 37.0 web browser to the Developer channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Games

Along with the launch of the Vulkan 1.0 specifications by the Khronos Group, Valve’s boss Gabe Newell made some comments in which he takes another jab at Windows and DirectX 12.

It’s no secret that Valve’s founder and boss doesn’t like the gaming monopoly of Microsoft and Windows. Ever since Microsoft announced its intentions of releasing games through the Windows Store, a few years back, Gabe has been working towards building some proper competition.

The Talos Principle amazing puzzle game from Croteam prides itself with being the first game that can showcase the new Vulkan 1.0 in action although many more are set to follow.

In per the folks at Croteam’s words, Vulkan is a portable low-level graphics API that is built to work across many GPU vendors and operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Android. This makes it better, in many ways, than the current APIs like DirectX and OpenGL.

Mad Max the open world survival game from Avalanche Studios looks even more likely to be coming to Linux. We shared with you at the start of February details that it might be coming to Linux, and now it looks quite likely.

Last week I wrote a little article about something that I felt was a truly terrible idea – the KDE project’s announcement of their own Linux Distro… dubbed “KDE Neon.”

The reaction, by portions of the KDE community, to that article would be best described as “a bit intense.” People were angry with me for writing something that was so negative towards a KDE project. People were angry with the KDE community for allowing such a project to exist. People were… angry.

A new milestone towards the GTK+ 3.20 open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit has been released earlier, February 17, 2016, advancing the development cycle of the software.

It’s no secret that one of the main features I wanted to land this cycle was introductory support for Xdg-App. There really was quite a bit to do to make that happen, including all sorts of seemingly unrelated plumbing.

A while back we introduced the idea of Kali Linux Customisation by demonstrating the Kali Linux ISO of Doom. Our scenario covered the installation of a custom Kali configuration that contained select tools required for a remote vulnerability assessment. The customised Kali ISO would undergo an unattended autoinstall in a remote client site and automatically connect back to our OpenVPN server over TCP port 443. The OpenVPN connection would then bridge the remote and local networks, allowing us full “layer 3” access to the internal network from our remote location. The resulting custom ISO could then be sent to the client who would just pop it into a virtual machine template and the whole setup would happen automagically with no intervention – as depicted in the image below.

Reviews

Makulu 10 Xfce edition continues developer Jacque Raymer’s track record of pushing the limits with useful and innovative features to keep his distro line a step ahead of the crowd.

He released Makulu 10 Xfce this week after more than 12 months in the making. The focus on this build is stability, speed and social integration. After spending several frustrating days chasing away glitches, I found that the Xfce edition can claim success with two of those three goals.

Arch Family

While Manjaro Linux has been available for desktop Linux environments for a few years now, it has not been available for ARM devices. This past week marked a huge turning point for Raspberry Pi users, as the Manjaro Arm project marked its first alpha release. The reason this is such big news is that many Raspberry Pi users did not have a great entryway into Arch Linux prior to the Manjaro Arm Project. Arch has always been available for the Raspberry Pi, through either a direct download or using NOOBS, but neither is as user friendly as most other Raspberry Pi distros. This is where Manjaro Linux comes into the picture. Manjaro provides a more user-friendly approach to Arch with the goal of getting users into the Arch space who found either the installation or documentation a bit overwhelming.

openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed goes through automated tests before a snapshot is released and heavily relies on openQA for the process of Tumbleweed to create regular snapshots.

[...]

The automated testing of openQA is currently running with only two workers left instead of the usual 10. The remaining workers are largely overloaded and can’t cope with the workload to produce new snapshots.

One of my objectives for 2016 is to pass the RHCSA exam. One of the problems of this is cost, while I can’t afford to take a course I some how need to create myself a lab where I can install multiple copies of the OS to play with. I’m lucky enough to have subscribed to the RH Developer program so I have access to RHEL but don’t currently have the hardware.

In other news, I’m now an Emeritus Member of the GNOME Foundation. This means that I’m quite a few time without substantial contributions to the project. Sad . The good news is that working at Red Hat I’m closer than ever to contribute to Open Source projects! I hope to be back to the game soon

Fedora

It has been quite some time since I last wrote about Korora Linux (Korora 20 – Peach) and I think that is a mistake on my part, because Korora is a good distribution that deserves consideration. I think of Korora as being “Fedora++”. They start from the Fedora distribution, and then add in (or put back) all sorts of interesting and useful things that the Fedora developers can’t (or won’t, or didn’t) include. They also configure and customize several different desktops, making them much more useful than the default desktops.

So my time at FOSDEM was pretty much the following. Walk into the hall where the Fedora/CentOS tables were. Get met by someone who worked on or in EPEL. Try to have a conversation and find that it was too packed and loud there. Walk over to the coffee area and buy the person a coffee and listen. Finish conversation and walk back over to the table.. [take a break every now and then to use the restroom from drinking a 16 oz tea every 30 minutes.] This was a lot of conversations and they did all blur together after a while. [Using a technique I learned from Centos' Karanbir Singh at FOSDEM, I will bring a small notebook to the next conference and write down a problem per page per person. Then I can go back the next year and see if the problems are still there.]

I don’t think anything above is new to people who have been contributing to EPEL in the last ~10 years. A lot of the problems are ones that were brought up in the beginning as we tried to square the circle of differing use cases. However, I wanted to catalogue them here and then make a promise that I will do my best to figure out ways to solve them by FOSDEM 2017 in some form or another.

Compared to my other kernel teammates, I’m a relative newcomer to how the kernel is packaged and prepared. They’ve been amazing at helping me understand how the Fedora kernel comes together. Much of the packaging scripts and tools for the kernel have grown organically and some of the knowledge is a bit tribal. I’ve tried to do my part by updating the kernel wiki. Even so, there’s many parts of the kernel package which could use improvement.

In the run up to Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, Canonical has released details of its next Ubuntu OS smartphone to come to market, and it offers the highest spec of any phone running the platform so far.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is going to integrate full support in Mir for the latest Vulkan 1.0 specifications.

Vulkan is stealing all the headline in the Linux world and with good reason. It’s an incredible leap forward for the open source platform, even if Vulkan is technically aimed at all the major operating systems, including Windows, Android, and even Tizen.

The new BQ Aquaris M10 is the first ever Ubuntu powered tablet. This has gone under the radar of many, especially in a time where tablets aren’t getting the same attention they were receiving three quarters ago. Ubuntu is also quite foreign to the mass market. For those who don’t know, it’s a completely different operating system, sitting alongside the Windows and Mac systems of the world. A lot of techies, or computer wizards, are fond of playing around with Ubuntu because of its open-source availability to numerous developers who love customising their personal PCs.

The top story today must be the new Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu phone as the announcement was picked up by almost everyone. Running a close second is the news that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now be run on Microsoft’s Azure. In other news, Linus Torvalds gave a talk at TED and Bryan Lunduke suffered the backlash of an angry Neon crowd after last week’s opinion of the project. Finally, Jamie Watson tested recently released Korora 23.

With Vulkan now being public, Canonical developer Stephen Webb has confirmed they are planning to have Vulkan platform support ready for Mir by Ubuntu 16.04.

Vulkan is designed to support Mir alongside Wayland and X11 on Linux while according to this Google+ post by Webb, they are hoping to have the Mir server bits done in time for the Ubuntu 16.04 release in April.

Is there a way to get systemd to not throw away… stderr? This is driving us nuts when we have about six hundred Ubuntu servers, and simple problems are harder to solve because stderr is not displayed in the terminal or saved in the journal.

The core of the Firepower NGFW is a new Linux operating system distribution. Harrell explained that Cisco is calling its new Linux powered operating system FXOS (Firepower eXtensible Operating System). The new FXOS introduces service-chaining capabilities that can help to enable a security inspection and remediation workflow.

Phones

Tizen

The Samsung Open Source Group released a Tizen 3.0 beta for the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, underscoring the broad OS support for the world’s favorite hacker SBC.

Last week’s news that Tizen 3.0 has been ported to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is the latest example of how the year-old ARMv7 version of the Pi is attracting ports from more powerful Linux distributions, most notably Fedora, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Snappy Core. The Samsung Open Source Group’s Tizen for Pi project has been underway for several years, achieving several beta releases, and now the effort has shifted to the new Tizen 3.0. It’s still in beta, but now you can create builds for the Pi 2 using tools from the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded project.

Samsung holds much hope for their upcoming flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, and in-line with the usual new flagship frenzy we have had several leaks of the devices, all being just ahead of their February 21 unveiling at Mobile World Congress (MWC). One of the leaked pictures is reportedly a press release render of the devices, and this is the one that is Intrguing to us here at Tizen Experts. Now the S7 will launch with Android, that is pretty much a given, but the thing of Interest is the graphics that is being shown displayed over both Smartphones.

Android

Plug a phone or tablet running Windows 10 or Android into the NexPad, and you have a more productivity-oriented environment, with the mobile device serving as a secondary screen. (According to NexDock, you could also connect the shell to a Raspberry Pi or something like the Intel Compute Stick, or to an iPhone via a display connector.) The NexPad doesn’t contain a processor, memory, or storage; all that has to be provided by your small computing device.

We’ve often been asked the question, ‘which smartphone do I buy?’ And to arrive at the most optimal solution, we go on to enquire the use patterns. All in the bid to understand which feature could be lifted up higher in the order of priority. Then comes the most important question – budget!

No, that’s not a typo in the title. An unknown Indian company by the name Ringing Bells has introduced what’s probably the cheapest Android smartphone for just Rs 251 which is less than USD 4 (actually $3.65 at present rates). What’s even more surprising is the looks and specs of Freedom 251. Take a deep breath and have a look at this.

I’m always surprised when users wish that Microsoft Office or PhotoShop would be ported to Linux. Probably, some just want to be able to use standard industry software on their favorite operating system. But so far as I am concerned, applications like LibreOffice Writer or Krita are not just substitutions — even without my ideals, I would choose them as the highest quality software available for my needs.

So let’s take a look at four excellent choices for managing bugs and issues, all open source and all easy to download and host yourself. To be clear, there’s no way we could possibly list every issue tracking tool here; instead, these are four of our favorites, based on feature richness and the size of the community behind the project. There are others, to be sure, and if you’ve got a good case for your favorite not listed here, be sure to let us know which is your favorite tool and what makes it stand out to you, in the comments below.

Open source development and collaboration takes place online, in places made of information. From individual commit messages to project websites and even larger digital structures, each piece of information we create is part of a mess. This is not a slight against open source; all human endeavors are messy, because that is just the way we are as human beings. We all bring our own strengths and failings, wisdom and ignorance, to everything we do.

The embrace of the OpenDaylight SDN controller follows the support of the ONOS controller in the first release of the Atrium software last year.
Open Networking Foundation officials are hoping to accelerate the adoption of network virtualization by including support for the OpenDaylight SDN controller in the latest release of its open-source Atrium software distribution.

Bottle Rocket has stepped out from behind its proprietary code and expanded its reach into the open-source market.

The Addison-based company, which creates custom mobile applications for business customers, has released its first few pieces of code for Android and plans to build on the code it has shared with the development community.

Putting limits on what the Internet of Things can do to transform everything from in-store retail operations to multinational logistics is a great way to hamstring a potentially revolutionary technology. So too is keeping the way IoT apps and services are developed locked away behind the closed doors of intellectual property laws.

Fortunately, IBM has seen the light of publicly supported solutions and is releasing a new open-source IoT development tool by the name of Quarks. Supported by the IBM Streams platform that specializes in compiling and analyzing gigabytes of live data in real time, Quarks might be used alternatively by hospitals to share designs for vitals monitoring apps that can be used with wearables and by industrial companies outfitting their workers’ uniforms with safety sensors, TechCrunch reported.

IBM has open sourced new technology called Quarks to push Internet of Things (IoT) analytics from centralized systems out to the actual edge devices that are collecting and spewing out vast amounts of data.

Flow-Based Programming (FBP) is a software development paradigm where applications are built by “wiring together” various reusable components inside a graph.

Since running into the concept in 2011, I’ve built the NoFlo environment, which brings Flow-Based Programming to the universal runtime of JavaScript, allowing flows to be run on both Node.js and the browser.

Events

As a fresh start of 2016, I got a chance to be part of Devconf – an annual conference which takes place in the beautiful Brno city of Czech Republic. From past three years, its been happening in February month’s first Friday to Sunday and hence this year it was from 5th to 7th February.

Hundreds of people from around the world will meet at LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System, March 19-20, 2016 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. This year’s conference program will examine how free software creates the opportunity of a new path for its users, allows developers to fight the restrictions of a system dominated by proprietary software by creating free replacements, and is the foundation of a philosophy of freedom, sharing, and change. Sessions like “Yes, the FCC might ban your operating system” and “GNU/Linux and Chill: Free software on a college campus” will offer insights about how to resist the dominance of proprietary software, which is often built in to university policies and government regulations.

Before we wrap up this series on securing Hadoop databases, I am happy to announce that Vormetric has asked to license this content, and Hortonworks is also evaluating a license as well. It’s community support that allows us to bring you this research free of charge. Also, I’ve received a couple email and twitter responses to the content; if you have more input to offer, now is the time to send it along to be evaluated with the rest of the feedback as we will assembled the final paper in the coming week. And with that, onto the recommendations.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

The Document Foundation (TDF) released LibreOffice 5.1 on Feb. 10, providing users with a new milestone update of the popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice originated as a fork of the open-source OpenOffice suite in 2011 and has been downloaded more than 120 million times since then. LibreOffice includes Writer document, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, Base database and Draw drawing programs as part of the integrated suite. In the LibreOffice 5.1 update, a key area of improvement is the user interface throughout the suite’s programs, which all benefit from a reorganization as well as menu additions. With the 5.1 update, the office suite’s integrated programs can now load and save files from remote locations directly through menu dialog box. LibreOffice is the default standard office suite in many mainstream Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and Ubuntu. LibreOffice is also available for both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the new LibreOffice 5.1 release.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

In addition to being closed source, there was another catch: in order to use it, you need the Spotify premium subscription. Speaking from my own experience supporting a project integrating with Spotify for the last six years: lots of end users upgraded to premium in order to use the projects built on top of libspotify.

Public Services/Government

Schools in the city of Tallinn (Estonia) are gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. A pilot in March 2014 switched 3 schools and 2 kindergartens. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools.

Openness/Sharing

The Benjamin Franklin Award is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatis.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.

Open Data

Two geography students have started a Maptime chapter in State College to support community cartography and teach people how to use and create maps. The endeavor is co-sponsored by The Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach in Penn State’s Department of Geography.

“I really want to put State College on the map—literally,” geography graduate student Carolyn Fish said. “So much open-source mapping is centered in large cities, such as New York, Washington and San Francisco.”

Open Hardware

Montana-based startup CowTech launched an affordable 3D scanner kit on Kickstarter and they easily breezed past their funding goal in the first 24 hours. The CowTech Ciclop is a $99 3D laser scanner kit that was designed specifically with owners of 3D printers in mind. The buyer can print most of the scanner parts out on their own 3D printer and the parts were designed to fit on virtually any desktop 3D printer with a print bed volume of 115 x 110 x 65 mm (4.5 x 4.3 x 2.6 in) or higher. Once all of the components have been printed, the assembly process is quick and simple, and the Ciclop can start scanning in less than 30 minutes.

Programming

Today we release Go version 1.6, the seventh major stable release of Go. You can grab it right now from the download page. Although the release of Go 1.5 six months ago contained dramatic implementation changes, this release is more incremental.

The most significant change is support for HTTP/2 in the net/http package. HTTP/2 is a new protocol, a follow-on to HTTP that has already seen widespread adoption by browser vendors and major websites. In Go 1.6, support for HTTP/2 is enabled by default for both servers and clients when using HTTPS, bringing the benefits of the new protocol to a wide range of Go projects, such as the popular Caddy web server.

Sure it is easy I hear you say – well it may do you some good not to be a slave to Facebook etc., and you can help youth charity Whitelion.

Whitelion , is challenging everyone to put down those phones, back away from technology and try living in the ‘real world’ for 48 hours by signing up to ‘Social Lockout’, agreeing to lock themselves out of their social media channels for 48 hours, whilst raising money and awareness for disconnected youth.

Even five years ago, this wouldn’t have seemed like such a big ask, but nowadays people are ‘joined at the hip’ to their social media networks and in some cases this can genuinely create FOMO, particularly for our youth, leading to higher levels of depression and anxiety. (APS Stress & Wellbeing in Australia Survey 2015).

MICROSOFT HAS announced the retirement of a number of courses in its Certification programme which may have a direct effect on those studying for particular qualifications.

The Microsoft website explained: “As technology changes, we add new exams and revise or retire older exams. Our goal is to provide at least six months’ notice prior to retirement to give you an opportunity to finish earning your certification.”

Redmond is keen to point out that, if you have taken the course, it is still valid towards your overall qualification even if it is retired. But if one of the retired courses is core, you must take it before the retirement date and preferably allow time for retakes in case of failure, unless you’re feeling very cocky.

Science

Ocean Cleanup array, an idea of Boyan Slat, consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms. These booms and platforms can be dispatched to the garbage patches around the world.

This cleanup array would act as a giant funnel spanning over an area of a particular radius. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.

Health/Nutrition

Russia’s food safety regulator Rosselkhoznadzor just announced a complete ban starting February 15 on all US corn and soy imports. This is a huge blow to organic and GM farmers alike, though the ban will be instated due to genetically modified crop and microbial contamination.

The panel was convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in December (IPW, Public Health, 16 December 2015) with a deadline of June 2016. Its objective is “to review and assess proposals and recommend solutions for remedying the policy incoherence between the justifiable rights of inventors, international human rights law, trade rules and public health in the context of health technologies.”

Some developed countries are saying that a mandatory disclosure requirement would introduce uncertainty into the patent system, and would complicate the implementation of benefit sharing. Most developing countries insist that the disclosure requirement should be mandatory and should apply to various IP instruments, not only patents.

In response to the concerns about industry lobbying voiced by civil society recently at a symposium on agricultural biotechnologies, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) director general insists on the UN agency’s neutrality.

“Let me reassure you that FAO does not support transnational corporations. FAO is a neutral forum and we stand by our mandate to eradicate hunger and malnutrition,” FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva was quoted as saying in a release today.

The World Health Organization today issued its strategic response framework and joint operations and research plan, which lays out a strategy until June, to investigate and respond to the medical complications linked to the spreading Zika virus.

Zika is suspected to have a role in microcephaly (babies born with small heads), and neurological conditions.

Watch our full 49-minute report featuring voices from the front lines of Michigan’s water wars. Lead contamination in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, has forced residents to drink, cook with and even bathe in bottled water while still paying some of the highest water bills in the country. In this Democracy Now! special report, we go from Flint to Mecosta County, Michigan, where Nestlé, the world’s largest water bottling company, is pumping millions of gallons of water from aquifers that feed Lake Michigan.

RESIDENTS OF FLINT, MICHIGAN, who drank lead in their water may also have been exposed to perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, according to a report from the Michigan Department of Community Health.

The May 2015 report showed elevated levels of PFCs in the Flint River — including PFOA, also known as C8, the chemical that spread into drinking water around a DuPont plant in West Virginia and led to a landmark class-action lawsuit. In addition to C8 and PFOS, a similar molecule that’s also based on a chain of eight carbon atoms, scientists found 11 other PFCs in the Flint River ­— more than in any of the other water sources tested around the state.

The contingency plan, known internally as Nitro Zeus, was intended to be carried out in the event that diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear development program failed and the US was pulled into a war between Iran and Israel, according to an article published by The New York Times. At its height, planning for the program involved thousands of US military and intelligence personnel, tens of millions of dollars in expenditures, and the placing of electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to ensure the operation targeting critical infrastructure would work at a moment’s notice.

Another piece of the plan involved using a computer worm to destroy computer systems at the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which was built deep inside a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. It had long been considered one of the hardest Iranian targets to disable and was intended to be a follow-up to “Olympic Games,” the code name of the plan Stuxnet fell under.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

“The corporation is now fundamentally more powerful than the nation-state,” writes journalist Antony Loewenstein in his new book “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe.”

“Many ongoing crises seem to have been sustained by businesses to fuel industries in which they have a financial stake,” he explains. “Companies that entrench a crisis and then sell themselves as the only ones who can resolve it.”

Loewenstein, a columnist for the Guardian, traveled the world in order to understand just how multinational corporations profit off of such chaos. The Australian-born yet decidedly cosmopolitan journalist devotes the meticulous and daring tome to reporting on the foreign exploitation he witnessed in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and the destructive mining boom in Papua New Guinea, along with seemingly dystopian prison privatization in the U.S., predatory for-profit detention centers for refugees in Australia and ruthless austerity in Greece.

Thousands of innocents may have been killed by Hellfire and other missiles fired by Predator drones because the algorithm for tracking these people might have been horribly wrong. Unlike the SKYNET in the Terminator series which turns against humans when it gains intelligence, NSA’s SKYNET may have actually cost hundreds of innocent lives due to a faulty programming.

Transparency Reporting

The report, dated 29 January 2016, is written by the Operation Commander, Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino of the Italian Navy, for the European Union Military Committee and the Political and Security Committee of the EU. It gives refugee flow statistics and outlines the performed and planned operation phases (1, 2A, 2B and 3), the corresponding activities of the joint EU forces operating in the Mediterranean and the future strategies for the operation.

One of the main elements within the report is the planned, but still pending transition from Phase 2A (operating in High Seas) to Phase 2B (operating in Libyan Territorial Waters) due to the volatile government situation in Libya, where the building of a ‘Government of National Accord’ (GNA) is still under way.

FOIA reform is (yet) again working its way through the bowels of Congress. Unfortunatley, the FOIA process is resistant to fixing because there’s very little in it for the government. Agencies are supposed to err on the side of openness and transparency, but a stack of broadly-written exemptions makes it’s far too easy for them to operate in opacity.

One of the major problems with the FOIA process is that it takes a lawyer on retainer and lots of money to get the most out of it. For most FOIA filers, an agency’s refusal to respond in a timely fashion or release requested information is the end of the line. Unless they’re working in conjunction with a major journalistic enterprise, the FOIA ball is completely in the government’s court.

Florida’s “Sunshine Law” is widely regarded as one of the best state-level open records laws in the nation. Unfortunately, the Florida legislature is now trying to eliminate one of the key components—a measure allowing successful plaintiffs in public records lawsuits to recover attorney’s fees. Currently, reimbursement is mandatory when the plaintiff prevails, but the proposed law would make this a discretionary choice by the judge.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

The Saudis said this morning that the Kingdom is willing to freeze production at January levels of output, alongside Russia, Qatar and Venezuela in order to support the international oil price. “Freezing now at the January level is adequate for the market, we believe” said Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister. “We recognise today the supply is going down because of current prices. We also recognise that demand is on the rise.” But what’s really going on?

Finance

As an economist, it is a mystery to me how any economist can think that a population that does not produce the larger part of the goods that it consumes can afford to purchase the goods that it consumes. Where does the income come from to pay for imports when imports are swollen by the products of offshored production?

We were told that the income would come from better-paid replacement jobs provided by the “New Economy,” but neither the payroll jobs reports or the US Labor Departments’s projections of future jobs show any sign of this mythical “New Economy.”

There is no “New Economy.” The “New Economy” is like the neoconservatives’ promise that the Iraq war would be a six-week “cake walk” paid for by Iraqi oil revenues, not a $3 trillion dollar expense to American taxpayers (according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) and a war that has lasted the entirely of the 21st century to date and is getting more dangerous.

The dangers of corporate sovereignty chapters in so-called “free trade” agreements are increasingly well-known. That’s especially the case for Techdirt readers, since we’ve been warning about this parallel legal system, which puts corporations above national laws, for well over three years. Now that the general issues of these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are widely understood, people are starting to explore more specific problems.

Minister, why don’t you, your fellow cabinet members and party members practise democracy, respecting our constitution and rakyat’s voice and rights, telling the truth, respecting the laws, and honesty, for a start?

Indonesian officials have banned Tumblr from the country because of its pornographic content. The shutdown came as the government shut down almost 500 sites in total.

An official in Indonesia’s Information Ministry said the site was shut down without informing the Yahoo-owned company first, the BBC reports. Other websites that have been blocked in the country due to their content include Vimeo and Netflix.

Privacy

It’s taken more than a decade, but a critical oversight board tasked with advising the president on the privacy and civil liberties implications of the NSA’s surveillance programs is finally getting a technology adviser who understands how the government’s surveillance tools actually work.

The government announced last week that respected Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin has been appointed the first technology scholar for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—the board that gained notoriety in 2014 after it condemned the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program (.pdf) but found little wrong with its court-ordered bulk collection of data from ISPs like Google and Yahoo.

Until now, the five-member PCLOB has consisted primarily of lawyers, three of whom are former attorneys with the US Department of Justice and only one of whom has a civil liberties background—James X. Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that broadband services didn’t need additional consumer privacy protections because “public shame” would keep the broadband industry honest. But in late 2014, Verizon found itself at the center of a privacy scandal after security researchers discovered the company was embedding stealth tracking technology in every packet sent by the company’s wireless users. These “stealth cookies” were being used by Verizon for two years before they were even discovered, and it took another six months of public and press outrage for Verizon to let users opt out.

All citizens agree the government should be able to have certain information for investigations, like the data of a dead violent criminal. But it is in moments like this when the government can exploit consensus to obtain power the government does not and should not have.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid a $17,000 ransom in bitcoins to a hacker who seized control of the hospital’s computer systems and would give back access only when the money was paid, the hospital’s chief executive said Wednesday.

Martin Gottesfeld, the alleged Anonymous hacker responsible for 2014’s hacking attack at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been arrested by the FBI. Martin’s co-workers and relatives contacted the security agency after he went missing, only to be rescued by a Disney Cruise ship.

“Tor is essential,” Shari Steele says over the phone. “Tor is so critically important. We can’t afford to not have Tor.”

That’s the kind of thing someone might say when all hell is about to break loose, but Steele sounds downright ecstatic. Over her career, she has taken on United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). She built the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) into an international powerhouse for protecting online rights.

Today, she has a new mission, perhaps her heaviest challenge yet: Take the Internet’s most powerful privacy tool mainstream.

THE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH has revealed the names, addresses, signatures, dates of birth and mobile phone numbers of hundreds of students on its public website in a breach of the Data Protection Act.

The posting of the details, all belonging to research students, was reported to the BBC by one of those affected after they found that their personal information could be viewed by a simple Google search.

The university insisted that the details have been removed and has released a statement explaining that Louise Nadal, the institution’s secretary, is “sorry” about the incident.

Do you have a teen driver in your household and want to know every time they get a little overzealous with the accelerator? Or maybe you’re pretty sure your spouse’s frequent trips to “the office” are not so innocent? If so, then an upcoming update for Verizon’s “hum” in-car smart device might be just what you’re looking for.

Bureaucracy simulators received a new lease on life thanks to Papers, Please, which tasked players with deciding, via a bunch of paperwork, whether citizens were fit to cross a border or not. Need to Know takes that template in an interesting new direction, placing you as an agent with the Department of Liberty, an organisation that monitors personal data in order to determine whether someone is dangerous or not.

In an interview with Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff published today, National Security Agency director Michael Rogers declared that the terrorists involved in last November’s attacks in Paris used at least some encrypted communications to plan their actions, preventing NSA from being able to warn French officials in advance. Because of encrypted communications, he said, “we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened.”

UK Home Secretary Theresa May has echoed the sentiments of the FBI, GCHQ and the Obama administration that strong end-to-end encryption should not be allowed to interfere with police investigations.

“The British government believes encryption plays a valuable role in today’s society. It helps keep people’s personal data and intellectual property safe from theft by cyber criminals. It helps our economy grow and prosper. But as President Obama has said, we cannot be in a situation where technology is also used by terrorists and criminals to escape justice,” she said during a recent Five Country Ministerial meeting in Washington DC.

“The government has a responsibility to protect national security and ensure public safety. Communications service providers have a responsibility to their customers to ensure their privacy. Together we can find a way that achieves both.”

But, really, the main thing that gets me about this report is that we keep seeing Congress and the President going on and on and on about cybersecurity threats against the US — and yet basically the only significant examples all seem to be the US attacking other countries. The inbound attacks — such as the OPM hack or even the Sony hack — actually seem fairly minor in comparison. Those are just hacks to get at data, not to actually break stuff. Yes, it’s possible that US officials are freaking out because now they really understand the depth of what can be done thanks to the NSA doing it first, but maybe we should be thinking about dealing with that fact and shoring up our defenses (and not giving reasons to others to emulate us), rather than creating faux moral panics.

Last night, we wrote about a judge’s order commanding Apple to help the FBI effectively decrypt the contents of Syed Farook’s iPhone 5C. Farook, of course, along with his wife, was responsible for the San Bernardino attacks a few months ago. Many of the initial reports about the order suggested that it simply ordered Apple to break the encryption — which made many people scoff. However, as we noted, that was not accurate. Instead, it was ordering something much more specific: that Apple create a special firmware that would disable two distinct security features within iOS — one that would effectively wipe the encrypted contents following 10 failed attempts at entering the unlocking PIN (by throwing away the stored decryption key) and a second one that would progressively slow down the amount of time between repeated attempts at entering the PIN.

The Secure Chorus Group is announced to support and promote interoperable, secure communications for enterprise and government.

Secure Chorus is an independent, not-for-profit group with founding members including Armour Communications, BT, CESG, Cryptify, Cyber Y, Finmeccanica, Samsung, SQR Systems and Vodafone. Further members will be announced soon.

It’s not often that UK organisations have banded together to create a security standard with global significance but that is what appears to be happening with a new GCHQ-backed initiative called Secure Chorus, announced on 15 February 2016 at the Mobile World Congress (MWC).

The website outlining Secure Chorus is still pretty sparse when it comes to technical explanation so we thought we’d look a little deeper at what it is being proposed and what influence it might come to have on

A federal judge’s order directing Apple to help the FBI break into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone effectively “forces private-sector companies like Apple to be used as an arm of law enforcement,” one of the most prominent pro-encryption voices in Congress said Tuesday night.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer-science graduate, wondered where the use of the All Writs Act—on which the magistrate judge based her ruling—might lead.

Civil Rights

This seems like a good, solid arrangement—if the goal is to produce the most bloated, corrupt, criminal, warmongering, terrorist-coddling, bankrupt government the Earth has ever known—it is, indeed, all of these things. But it has just one tiny flaw: getting people to vote for you by teaching them to hate the other side is effective, but it’s purely negative. To introduce a positive, aspirational element, it is necessary to somehow make people feel that it is possible to bring about political change by voting for someone within the Democratic or the Republican party. Of course, this is sheer nonsense, because the only people pulling the strings are the ones who write the checks, and you don’t get to vote for any of them. But people don’t want to believe that they are completely powerless, and the same people who fell for it in thinking that they could bring about change by voting for Obama are now falling for it again, thinking that they can bring about change by voting for Bernie. No, you can’t possibly ever change things by voting for the Democratic/Republican duopoly. Oh, and you can’t possibly ever change things by voting against it either. Sorry, Jill Stein.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

But in spite of these rights, experience has taught me that — on the basis of my faith alone — some people will never treat me as a fellow American. Last fall, I was denied service at a commercial gun range in my home state of Oklahoma as a result of the prejudice and misinformation that caused this business to declare itself a “Muslim-free establishment.” Working with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, I filed a federal lawsuit alleging that my civil rights were violated that day.

France is set to give all workers the “right to disconnect” from work emails as the scale of “burn-out” among employees draws government concern.

Hidden hours of work outside France’s well-known 35 hour week has led the country’s labour ministry to want to preserve the sanctity of their private life in law.

Myriam El Khomri, the labour minister, is still thrashing out the details of an idea first put forward in a report by Bruno Mettling, director general of mobile giant Orange, in a new raft of labour laws to emerge soon.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that no spectrum will be given for free, even as telecom operators have demanded a cut in the proposed auction price for airwaves. The minister was talking to ET, when he highlighted how the public sector is busy combining infrastructure and leveraging the expertise of BSNL and the postal department so that the government plays is in a situation for a competitive battle with private players.

Over the last five years GoGo has effectively cornered about 80% of the in-flight broadband market, allowing the company to lag a little bit when it comes to giving a damn about customer satisfaction. And while the 3 Mbps per plane is starting to grow a little long in the tooth, the company has been raising prices for the service slowly but dramatically (though filters, throttling, and fake SSL certs are still free of charge).

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

When the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was first released in November last year, it included provisions dictating the kinds of penalties that should be available in cases of copyright infringement.

The hit show ‘Frozen’ has delighted children around the world since 2013 but there will be no ice-based fun in the UK this holiday week. Following a licensing mix up and threats from Disney, a tribute show planned to begin tomorrow has been canceled, leaving around 1,000 kids with melting dreams.

We already wrote about how CBS fucked up internet streaming of the Grammy’s on Monday night, but a few folks have sent in the various stories about how Grammy’s boss Neil Portnow did his now annual whine about how evil tech companies don’t pay musicians enough, and how if we don’t start giving musicians more money ISIS will win and the 12 year old who just performed on piano might starve or something.

We’ve argued at great length over the importance of the preamble of that section, “to promote the progress,” but many people are confused about the terms “science” and “useful arts.” In fact, many people not well-versed in the issue often get the two backwards and think that “science” refers to inventions, and thus enables a patent system, while “useful arts” refers to “artistic works” and thus enables the copyright system. The opposite is actually the case. “Science” at the time the Constitution was written was actually synonymous with “learning” and “education” (while “useful arts” was a term meaning invention and new productivity tools).